(lundi matin #175, 22/01/2019)
Let us not sulk for our pleasure! The movement against the labour law of the spring of 2016, the defense of the ZAD of NDDL [Notre-dame-des-landes]
in the spring of 2018 and finally the movement of the yellow vests that
appeared in autumn 2018 and which continues: the spirit of the time is
rebellion, each time in unprecedented forms. At the head of
demonstrations [le cortège de tête] in the first case, the
defense of a rural territory communised in the second, and finally the
blockages and uncontrolled demonstrations in the last.
An unknown territory, although familiar, has just acquired a
political existence. The yellow vests have in effect invested a
peripheral space made of up non-places, roundabouts, motorway tolls,
shopping center parkings, on these roads that serve to organise and
distribute atomised functions to which the neo-urban are assigned. This
day-to-day environment of millions of traffic jams in the early morning
and late afternoon seemed to have neutralized any possibility of an
event. Statistics say that half of the French population resides in this
periphery. But all these people remained desperately invisible … they
had to put on a yellow vest to exist, like others had to put on a
balaclava or a black k-way jacket … The fact that the Adama Traoré
committee quickly called to join the gatherings of yellow vests in
Paris is exemplary, Beaumont-sur-Oise, the border point between the
Parisian suburbs and what was once the french countryside, embodies
precisely this periphery of the metropolis which has taken on a
political existence (in this case since murder of Adama Traore) and it
does not intend to give it up.
To use a term that is not innocent, one can say that it is an
essentially provincial movement, and in this, it is completely new.
Demonstrations and riots break out in small towns where nothing ever
happened – the very ones where the State decrees the closing of train
stations, post offices, schools, maternity hospitals, why spend the
public money for the anonymous of the suburbs? Yellow vests rise up
everywhere. A riot in Nantes, St Nazaire, Caen, Rouen, still has nothing
improbable … But in Beauvais, Bar-le-Duc, Narbonne, Le Puy, Angers,
surprise! We know that, in their vast majority, the rioters who
ransacked the beautiful Parisian neighborhoods on December 1st and 8th
came from the said province. Their wandering in Paris was more a matter
of moving hooligans into enemy territory than of the traditional union
procession. The contempt of the provincials, displayed by this capital,
where the elites of the nation sit, finds its answer here. It has
already been said that Paris, now almost entirely pacified and
gentrified, could no longer be delivered over to ransacking and
vandalism. Never before has this been denied in such exemplary fashion.
The province is a typically French notion. In this common
language, which expresses the hierarchical organization of the nation,
one goes up to Paris and goes down to the provinces. At the top of the
pyramid thrones the capital, whose lights radiate throughout the
hexagon. Generally speaking, in the current configuration of capitalism,
the relation of the periphery and the center unfolds in a more
rectilinear than concentric way. However, in nation-states as
centralised and centralist as France, the circulation networks
inevitably overlap with a concentric organization of the territory that
remains decisive. While going up to Paris to terrorise the bourgeois of
the 8° [district or borough], the yellow vests reversed the pyramid.
The peripheral character of the movement is not only geographical and
political. Another centrality is questioned, that of the factory which
has for so long constituted the axis around which movements revolved.
Here it is no longer the company which constitutes the initial place of
aggregation. The people who find themselves on the road blockages did
not usually know each other before, their complicity was established
from a voluntary act that can be described as political. Hence the
disarray of the labour unions in the face of this movement, which were
also eager to sign a non-aggression agreement with the Macronie from the beginning of December (only Solidaires and some sections of the CGT
refused this declared act of collaboration). In relation to this, we
can measure the exhaustion of the union form, already perceptible in the
spring of 2016.
The Marxian analysis postulated that the genesis of exchange
value was in the production, the circulation of the commodity only
realising the value. But in this dynamic that is capitalism, all the
moments are dependent and have reality only in relation to the totality
that they thus form. Firstly because circulation adds value to products
and generates profit, (in the sense that a whole industry develops that
ensures this circulation, made up of banking, insurance, marketing,
transportation, storage, large distribution, not to mention the
activities induced …) (1) to the point where it becomes
difficult even to separate the two moments. This is obvious for products
such as energy, for example, the production of a nuclear power plant is
inconceivable without the high voltage lines that will distribute
electricity, the same for an oil refinery with its networks of stocks
and service stations. Similarly, textile made in China can only be
produced in function of giant container ships that will transport the
precious t-shirts to Western ports – and no one can claim that shipping
does not create value. In the extreme, the internet embodies the pure
circulation of value, rendered almost independent of the exploitation of
living labor -though it was necessary for the electronic and computer
tools that ensure it to have been manufactured in a factory. It thus
becomes problematic to isolate a segment of activity that would be
production in relation to the totality of the labour and the exchanges
that make up what is called society. The Italian comrades of the 70’s
already spoke about the factory-society – which is an oxymoron frankly
assumed, a factory not being a society but a system. To speak of the
global factory seems to us adequate at this moment when the capitalist
enterprise grasps and reconfigures all that exists in the mode of the
manufacturing plant, of the factory. A hub, whether maritime, airport or
road, a commercial area, and even a highway are so many of the wheels
of this global factory. The distinction between the private sphere and
the public domain, which since the French Revolution defined the
relations between civil society and the State, then fades under the
influence of apparatuses that are the real power organizing the movement
of individuals. In the global factory, the company loses all density
while the State is no more than a service provider.
The great cycles of workers’ struggles ended with the crisis of the
Fordist system. From the second half of the 70’s, most of the struggles
in Western Europe opposed the closure of the company and therefore the
atomisation of workers – and all of them ended in cruel defeats. Iron
and steel, mines, shipyards, and other sectors of industry, all the
strongholds of the working class, have passed. We could date the
historic moment when everything changed irremediably: it starts with the
defeat of FIAT workers in Turin in the autumn 1980, it continues in France with that of skilled immigrant workers of Talbot in 1983 and it ends with that of the British miners in the spring of 1985. The cycle concluded in Western Europe is now resurfacing in India or China …
The fact that the centrality of the factory in struggles has now
passed leads us to formulate the hypothesis that the next insurrections
will seize companies from the outside, and not the opposite (formulated
in Marxian terms, they will begin with circulation to then seize
production). In sum, like the GJ [Gilets Jaunes] movement that starts
from the periphery to invest the center. No longer though with the
perspective of self-management, where the workers seize the factory, but
in the opposite direction: powers coming from outside, constituted in
rupture with the logic of the global factory, would seize the factory to
transform or dismantle it according to their own necessities. We are
obviously not there yet, but the proliferation of revolts in the
periphery, since those of the suburbs in 2005 to the current GL
movement, indicates that a new cycle is starting, very different from
the previous one and which has not finished surprising us.
In the GJ, everything refers to circulation, both the initial demand
and the non-places where it was expressed. This may be the first time a
movement of this magnitude has sprung up from this location, with the
rejection of the fuel tax. And there was no lack of
trail-to-bike-ecologists to make mock it. Except that in a world based
on constrained mobility, the price of fuel is not innocent, unless you
live and work in the city center (and we know who now occupies the city
centres in France …). The suburban worker is literally trapped by this,
something which forces her/him to work to pay for an indispensable
automobile … to go to work! The action focuses on roundabouts, tolls,
parking entrances, elements of this reality. The plebs revolted against
the increase in the price of bread two centuries ago, it is now
rebelling against the increase in the price of petrol.(2)
That the question of fuel is eminently strategic, our governors
have understood for a long time. At the height of the May 1968 general
strike, they organised the gasoline shortage (while large stocks were
still available), to suddenly replenish gas stations just before the
Pentecost holiday … and millions French, relieved, who followed “the
events” as spectators, rushed onto the roads. Such a plot may have done
more against the movement than half a million pro-De Gaulle protesters
on the Champs-Elysées.(3)
Today’s atomised workers, unlike the mass workers of the Fordist era,
no longer have room to maneuver on wages, which stagnates while
everything increases, and therefore find themselves fighting against the
tax burden on their revenue. On the left, some suggest that in doing so
they take up this classic theme of liberal ideology of lowering taxes,
and this is true of some yellow vests, small bosses and traders. But the
majority is well aware that in this case if tax cuts there have been,
they were applied exclusively to very high incomes, above all by means
of the elimination of the ISF [Impôt de solidarité sur la fortune/Solidarity tax on wealth].
Furthermore, if the question of wages arises from within a company, the
tax question arises in relation to the State: it therefore takes on a
directly political resonance (knowing in addition how much fuel taxes
fuel the State budget …).(4) From this point of view, the fact of
making the motorways free and smashing the radars shows that this racket
is perceived more and more like a rent situation worthy of the Ancien
Régime. Except that this time it is not tax collectors who gorge on the
backs of people, but the state and companies like Vinci who manage the
motorways … Moreover, it can not escape anyone that in recent weeks,
many yellow vests moved onto more social rather than fiscal demands
(minimum wage increase in particular), even if the return of the ISF is
still at the top of the list.
Under the Ancien Regime anti-tax revolts broke out unceasingly,
especially in the seventeenth century, which saw the consolidation of
the absolute monarchy.(5) With the French Revolution, a complete
overthrow: paying taxes becomes a civic duty, just like volunteering
under the flag (whereas before people fled at the approach of the
recruiting sergeant). This is the historical tour de force of the
bourgeoisie, and nothing says that it has exhausted all its effects.
Since then, refusing to pay taxes is assimilated to a gesture of Ancien
Régime. For the left, whose only horizon is that of republican
institutions, this question can no longer be asked. In the right-left
political binomial, it has been customary for this anti-tax dimension to
be the preserve of the liberal right, while the Keynesian left
advocated redistribution through state mechanisms financed by tax
levies. Now that left and right are aligned on the same positions, the
old tradition of anti-fiscal revolt can reappear … What is paradoxical
is that it is done in reference to the French Revolution – tricolour
flags, the Marseillaise, protesters in Phrygian caps …
In a month and a half, the yellow vests will have succeeded what the
labour unions have been unable to do during the past two decades.
Unorganised within the trade union framework, the yellow vests were not
trapped by its institutionalized modes of action or abused by subsidized
bureaucrats. Which also allowed beautiful riots in this Paris where the
provincial proletarians flocked … (and even if some of the yellow vests
do not assume this vandalism, their mere presence made it possible …
and there, there were no union marshals to break the enthusiasm).
Wandering thus tends to replace the classical demonstration. While
taking the lead in a march [le cortège de tête] was still
dependent on union protests and found its limits on May 1, 2018 (the
head of the march was as important as the trade union in numbers, with a
huge black block, and all this for an insignificant result). Freed from
any concept of a march or procession, the crowd drifts! Union marches
travel down the central avenues, a place of representation par
excellence, in a disciplined and disciplinary way. While the wanderings
of the yellow vests in Paris in November and December 2018 were
characterized from the outset by a scattering and freedom of movement.
It seems, however, that this is showing signs of rot; since
mid-December in Paris, the protest trajectories are registered in the
prefecture of the police and the march of the 12th January saw the
appearance of a marshals, on the union model – who appointed them? It is
not fortuitous that they appear precisely at the moment when
representatives begin to try to take control … In provincial towns,
however, the yellow vests have maintained their joyously uncontrollable
wanderings, or, as was said above, it is in the provinces where most of
the movement is played out. In Marseilles, on January 12th, the
wandering of the yellow vests drove those responsible for the repression
completely mad, for they had to follow a totally unexpected zigzag
journey, even taking a motorway tunnel and leaving the robocops out of
breath.
The road blockages often took the form of a camp that evokes the ZAD.
Which introduces a question: are these not the premises of an
“insurrectional urbanism” to come? what could be done with of all these
sites whose only interest is tactical, namely to be on the roads of
motor traffic? Never since the suburban revolt of 2005 has the criticism
of urbanism had been in fact so present. To conjure away the event,
this was the meaning of the inexorable extension of the global factory.
The tight flow of goods that organizes space must not allow any event to
happen – a breakdown, an earthquake, a blockage, a riot … But lo and
behold, it is revealed to be extremely vulnerable, just like the Fordist
assembly line was at the mercy of a simple sabotage. It is not by
chance that in several places the yellow vests have also blocked access
to Amazon warehouses, an iconic company if any … (6)
The camps constitute themselves as the basic form of the
communication, from Occupy Oakland to Taksim Square, from the camps on
the zocalo of Oaxaca to the camps of the Lakota Range, from the ZAD to
the strongholds of Val Susa. The construction of space comes first as a
political affirmation. While the protest demonstration remains
indifferent to the space it crosses, the occupation involves the
production of a commons which reconfigures the place. In this, the
blockages of the yellow vests are at the antipodes of Nuit Debout:
whereas these gatherings invested only central places, obeying the
hierarchical injunction which orders the urban and suburban space, and
gave primacy to speech, the GJ blockages are almost always in peripheral
zones or on major traffic arteries and give primacy to the very action
of blocking and to the relations that it establishes between the
participants. This is the great innovation of this movement. In
addition, if the organizers of Nuit Debout negotiated with the
police prefecture the possibility of remaining on the spot, the majority
of blockages are imposed in fact without asking for anything.
One demand is unanimous with all of the yellow vests, “Macron
resign”. This country, though it has guillotined its king, is still, two
centuries after, the most monarchical of Europe – and thus this
typically sans-culotte fury which animates the yellow vests.(7) But the
monarch is no longer invested with the sacred character he had under
the Ancien Régime: the French elect one, and then hate him after a few
months. The monarch of today is a product, quickly obsolete like
everything that is produced nowadays. After Sarkozy the cocaine addicted
caricature, then Holland the manic-depressive, and now the strapping
male, launched to put a spectacular end to the bipartisan regime
prevalent until then under the V Republic. The fact that he had never
been elected before designated him as the appropriate person to do so:
while the political class, composed of mayors, presidents of general and
regional councils, deputies and senators, is still stuck in relations
of dependence, the Macronie frees the government from such a
weight. From now on, the state coldly asserts that it is only a service
provider of capital. More negotiated arrangements, but pure injunction:
in this, Macronian governance devotes itself to the replacement of civil
society by the global factory. The presidential arrogance, that goes as
far as insult (these bastards of the poor!), reproduces the processes
used in modern companies, themselves inspired by the training and
drilling techniques used in the special units of the army.
In the GJ movement, the people thus came to take the place that
was occupied by the civil society dear to the citizens. A signifier
which comes by default – would have spoken, before the French
Revolution, one would have spoken of the vile multitude, or the plebs.
It is only by a game of mirrors with the State that the people are
constituted, as a homogeneous entity against the monarch (the famous 99%
…) and the monarchical character of the Macron presidency exacerbates
this double-reflection. Now the people refer to the nation, and
therefore to the republican State, products of the French Revolution. To
postulate a truth inherent to this subject, and which the referendum
would express, is the starting point of demagogy, that of the FN as well
as of the IF. “Left-wing populism should direct these affects towards
democratic goals,” says Chantal Mouffe, who adds, “The people are always
a collective subject, built in a discursive way.” That such a
construction necessarily takes place by exclusion – the immigrant, the
socially assisted, etc. – does not seem to touch the supporters of this
sub-gramscianism, and the politicians who claim it come to share the
same themes of their symmetrical opposites: the demagogue Ruffin thus
praises the confusions of Chouard, while Mélenchon on his side is
fascinated by the figure of Drouet … Populism consists of flattering the
affects produced by this world and maintaining them as something
positive, while a revolutionary attitude will wager on a future that
gives birth to new forms of political sensitivity in the course of the
struggle. We never lose sight of the fact that the negative is the
driving force of any movement. In fact, in all these rebel camps that
are multiplying in the world, the transcendent figure of the people
gives way to the immanence of what is common.(8)
Social classes, clearly identifiable until the end of Fordism, have
been liquefied – which is translated by the catch-all term
“middle-class”, which means precisely that it doesn’t identify anything.
The middle class, in wealthy countries like France, would be just about
everyone outside the bourgeois at the top, and immigrant workers and
the unemployed-for-life all the way at the bottom! One could say of a
Marseilles docker, for example, that he belongs to the old working class
by his work, and to the new middle class by his way of life and his
aspirations (to build, to take credits, to take care that his children
study and go on vacation to a dream destination). The yellow vests
identify themselves mainly as workers (even if retired, and they are
numerous in this movement), but what is paradoxical is that they do it
outside the sphere of work itself. Their recurring complaint is “we work
hard and we do not make ends meet” (variant for pensioners, “we worked
all of our lives and we barely have enough to eat”). All these people
have been made to believe that a life of hard work would sooner or later
find its reward in a certain well-being; but they are forced to realise
that this perspective is never anything but an endless ladder that they
will not cease to climb during their whole lives.(9)
One of the most interesting texts published on this movement
evokes a “tragedy of the middle class” which has to do with the relation
to money.(10) “The preoccupation with money is permanent, and
all the more so when one finally has access to it. One is of the middle
class when one earns enough money to, consciously or not, directly or
not, to think only about it. (…) There may be no social position where
we can know better what money is.” One could add: if for the most
destitute money is only a necessity, while for the rich money is the
very expression of freedom, for the majority of workers the relation to
money is constantly torn between these two extremes – in this, there
would exist an effectively middle-average class! It is the very
principle of spectacle capitalism to constantly mirror this freedom –
that of for example to be able to move in one’s own car … That this
spectacular freedom is made possible by a daily slavery, this is the
experience that everyone has in an intimate way, without ever being able
to express it. Which makes people sick, literally. And one must never
neglect the fact that the therapeutic side of revolt is what also gives
it political power.
As long as the State occupies the horizon of expectations for popular
rebellions, these fatally go to bed with nationalist demagogues of all
kinds. It is therefore not innocent that Macron has pulled out his joker with the proposal of the RIC [Réferendums d’Initiative Citoyenne/Citizens Initiative Referendums].
While the yellow vests were evolving towards social demands (increase
of the minimum wage and revaluation of the pensions, in particular), the
RIC tries to bypass this evolution by intervening as a miracle solution
– which would offer a face saving way out to such an unpopular
government. At the same time, the RIC also offers a way out for the
movement: that it leads to a vacuum does not prevent it from functioning
as a meta-claim that would put everyone in agreement within such a
heterogeneous dynamic. And people who have drawn their strength from
being assembled become enthusiastic about this proposal, while in fact
this pseudo-consultation will send everyone back to her/his initial
isolation of voter, stuck in a binary choice on questions-traps that the
sovereign will judge good to ask the populace. The referendum is the
supreme form of the political spectacle.(11)
The Macronie, which, in order to have nothing concrete to let go
of, is disposed to give ground on the level of representation, thereby
offering a perch to all those more or less under the influence of the
lucubrations of [Etienne] Chouard [a yellow vest “leader” and defender
of the citizens’ initiative referendum]. As Rafik Chekat says, “The
problem of the citizens’ initiative referendum (RIC) is that it
perpetuates the tyranny of the majority. Why would the majority always
be right? Without playing soft, belonging to a minority group makes you
suspicious vis-à-vis majorities because you know for a fact that in some
cases they can look like groups of lynchers. Can you imagine a #RIC
right after #charlie? That this demand for the RIC is carried by whites
is not a fortuitous thing. But beyond the racial question, what does it
mean to be a majority at the time of #BFMTV, # TF1, [french television
channels] #Hanouna, [french television presenter] the consumer society,
etc.? The problem of the RIC is basically that of the vote, this
mechanism that organises at regular intervals our impotence. We can try
to shorten these intervals, to vote more often, it will not change
anything. If it is necessary to speak in terms of subjectivation, the
vote creates a particular type of individual through a mutilated
relationship to existence, and more particularly to politics, to public
affairs.” Especially since it is difficult to imagine the government
holding a referendum on reintroducing the ISF or not (2/3 of French who
would be favorable, according to a survey).
The regime struggles to find interlocutors, it is obliged to go
fishing on Facebook. Most of the self-proclaimed leaders, and almost
immediately disavowed by the yellow vests, are carefully staged on
television and the media systematically co-opts characters with dubious
affinities – which also allows the right-thinking Leftists to bounce
back in their condemnation of the movement. Never before has the media
appeared so visibly for what they are: one of the two pillars of the
regime, with the police. It is, for them, a matter of trivialising the
idea that, outside of this regime, there is only the extreme right –
which we also know how much it is favoured among the ranks of the
police. It was already on the grounds of this lie that Macron managed to
win the presidential elections, and the president-elected-to-block-the
FN has just launched a new gadget, a “Great Debate”, where the first
issue addressed would be … that of immigration!
The importance taken on by so-called social networks in this case
is far from anecdotal. In the periphery, the network socializes. But
all those people who ended up in a yellow vest from a Facebook call
created an experience that is anything but virtual. The question now is
whether the yellow vests have rejected the political class to inaugurate
a kind of virtual democracy, where a like would replace the ballot, or
if, as those from Commercy explicitly propose, to organise in assemblies
of a new type. Because the network only socializes in a closed circuit,
generating the inter-self and where the charisma of some
“whistle-blowers” is free to express itself, to capture intensities. A
more fragmented form of media manipulation than that of the mainstream
media could then function as a technique of governance. A Tunisian
friend who took part in the 2011 insurrection spoke of the rapid
mobilisation capacity that the insurgents had had with social networks
in the early days, but also the fact that the police quickly understood
the interest and had not failed to intervene to spread false news and
misinformation … The amount of false debate circulating on these
networks in France is undoubtedly the same.
The articulation of the roundabout and general assemblies now arises,
after two months of agitation. On the one hand, the ties of proximity
and complicity woven on the ground, that allow taking action without
having to deliberate – and we know how much the deliberations in
assembly can be demobilising when it comes to direct action – but which
can only be exercised at the local level; on the other hand, directly
connected assemblies that could act as a place for strategic thinking
and tactical coordination.
In contrast to this perspective, the yellow vests could give birth to a demagogic movement, like the 5 Stelle
in Italy. A faction would probably be tempted to follow this path, even
if it means cutting itself off from the rest of the movement. It must
be remembered, however, that 5 Stelle was fully produced – even though it surfed on the short lived Forconi
[Pitch fork] movement. In the current state of things, the GJ would
lack the media clown essential to attract the attention of crowds, in
this case the figure of Beppe Grillo, a public entertainer put in the
saddle by some businessmen – the Berlusconi intermezzo was used up, it
was urgent to launch a new product. Italy has gone from decades of
secret government (P2, Andreotti, the strategy of tension and alliances with the mafia) to picture-tube government (Mani Pulite
[Clean Hands], Berlusconi and Beppe Grillo). The problem with this mode
of government is that it is necessary to renew the characters who
embody it as frequently as the show biz must renew the stars it
produces.
At a time when post-Fordist capitalism owes its survival to the rise
of fictitious capital and now operates in the open, the denunciation of
the excesses of finance – which leaves aside the essential, namely the
criticism of value, of money and merchandise – encourages all manner of
miracle solutions and demagogues. One remembers the well-worn gag of the
Tobin tax, for example, or the candidate Hollande: “My enemy is
finance” (this one was hilarious!) When almost all workers work to pay
their loans (especially for the automobile …), it is normal that the
banks are designated as a prime target, in words as in vandalism
(special dedication to GJ of Toulouse who ransacked several banks last
Saturday). But there is reason to be wary when, in addition, reference
is made to the Rothschild bank, rather than to BNP-Paribas or Société
Générale (whose rescue by the State after 2008 will finally cost the
taxpayers 30 billion euros …). The fact that Macron started his career
precisely in this bank obviously excites the anti-capitalism of fools
who point to “Jewish finance” on social networks.
It could be that this regime is really at the end of the race.
Sheltered by its soldiery, it can always increase its insolence – like
that of announcing, at the end of December, a scandalous
anti-unemployment measure. The head long rush the escalation of
repression was further aggravated, in comparison to the spring of 2016.
The attack the ZAD of Notre-dame-des-landes in April-May served as major
maneuvers. Serious injuries and mutilations by the dozens, collective
and individual humiliations, beatings, police intimidation, all go hand
in hand with an escalation (the outraged reactions of the entire media
caste to the good gesture of Christophe Dettinger
and the solidarity that followed says a lot about the disgusting
cynicism of these power brokers, when we see all these protesters
methodically mutilated by the police, something they never talk about).
Orders have been given in high places to do a great deal of harm, as
some commissioners admit. People are learning, and we are seeing more
and more equipped protesters (gas masks, ski goggles, scarves, gloves
etc.) at least to protect themselves. But it is clear that nowhere is
the movement yet able to organize itself to rout the police, and it is
here that the demobilizing nature of pacifist discourse is perceived.
This refers to the effectiveness of the blockages, which is quite
relative: the police have so far no difficulty in clearing access,
especially on strategic sites such as oil refineries – from this point
of view, there is nothing in relation to the Spring of 2016. On the
other hand, self-designated marshals have made their appearance in the
Saturday demonstrations, some former soldiers and others, defectors from
the CGT. Even if their ability to control the crowd is problematic,
this should not institutionalise itself …
This movement, obeying no vertical and centralised direction, allows
local initiatives to multiply. But these can diverge completely from one
place to another. After two months of agitation, the moment is
approaching a decision. A party, in the historical sense of the term,
proves itself as the victorious party by the fact that it splits into
two parties in turn: it thus proves that it contains in itself the
principle that it previously fought against outside, and thereby
eliminates the one-sidedness with which he had entered the scene. The
opposing elements that coexist within the movement have until now been
held together by a common hostility to the regime in place. Proponents
of an institutional outcome – which would obviously be authoritarian and
xenophobic – would then oppose supporters of a broadening of the
movement to all aspects of the global fabric from a revolutionary
perspective. In fact, actions are multiplying around struggling
companies where yellow vests are joining red vests on picket lines. It
is not forbidden to think that the movement can exert a strong enough
stimulation for workers to decide to block their company from the
inside, based on concrete demands. The national trade union leadership
would then be sent back to the trash cans of history, and a new
historical sequence could finally open. Which would imply that everyone
takes sides.
The latest news is, in the Landes the GJ are blocking a Monsanto factory, a centerpiece of the global factory …
Notes
1. The movement of goods is not limited to the transport and
distribution of goods: goods begin to circulate in commodity exchanges,
for example, while they have not yet moved. Conversely, raw materials
sold to an industrial company for processing are thus valued, having
been purchased, and they will enter into the determination of the value
of the finished product: here circulation is prior to production.
2. The small bosses of small and medium sized companies refusing a
tax on diesel that would increase their overhead costs did not fail to
dissociate themselves from the beggars who intended to continue the
struggle. A yellow vest of Ales thus denounces, on December 20, the
betrayal of some: “Shame on those calling themselves ‘apolitical’ and
claiming to lead the yellow vests of Cevennes by shaking the ‘anarchist’
specter that the intelligence services have whispered in their ears.
(…) Today, I do not want to measure my words anymore. However, it is
with the utmost calm that I accuse these so-called ‘coordinators’ of
being salespeople and traitors of the worst kind. Because the bare truth
is that of a fraction of entrepreneurs who promised everything to the
old, the unemployed, those earning the minimum wage and the precarious,
so as to swell their ranks. Once the tax was cancelled, these people
have claimed to structure the movement so as to take it in a certain
direction, for purpose of bringing the movement to a stop and allowing
themselves to gorge on the occasion of the end of year festivities. (… )
As for you, neighbors and colleagues who have mobilised for weeks; you
who have not given up anything to the wind or the cold or the rain; you
who have rediscovered solidarity and dignity on your barricades; you,
the anonymous base with no other ambitions than to live properly, I
salute you and send you the warm greetings of yellow vests in Alsace,
Franche-Comté, the A7 and Bollène!”
3. It was Michel Jobert, then chief of staff of Prime Minister
Georges Pompidou, who organised the operation – he publicly boasted
about it twenty years later.
4. In Mexico, for example, the increase in the price of gasoline in
January 2016 provoked a wave of massive demonstrations, often turning
into rioting and looting, which certainly owed nothing to the neoliberal
ideology!
5. Taxation and military conscription were the major reasons for
sedition. The book by Boris Porchnev is in this respect edifying: Les
soulèvements populaires en France de 1623 à 1648, Paris 1963, réed.
Flammarion 1972.
6. However, we must relativise the impact of the blockages … if the
trade of the city centers could be affected by the riots, which affected
their sales, the effectiveness of the blockages is far from obvious.
Supplies continued to be made, gas stations never ran out of fuel,
supermarket shelves continued to fill up, and Christmas waste was given
free rein, like other years.
7. The Constitution of the Fifth Republic grants to the President
powers which he had never had under previous regimes, which were
parliamentary, and in particular that of legislating by ordinances by
dispensing with the National Assembly. We know that De Gaulle, who was
of monarchist sensitivity, thought in 1958 to establish a constitutional
monarchy. Which he did, in a way: a monarch, but who would be elected
now.
8. At the height of the anti-monarchical revolts in the Occitan
country, the rebels identified themselves as the commons, rather than as
the people. The commons is precisely the political concept that
corresponds to a becoming revolutionary of struggles.
9. The notion of a “moral economy” that some have evoked with regards
to the GJ does not seem to us relevant in this case – if only because
EP Thompson formulated it about an English working class which
disappeared in the meantime, without talking about the “common decency”
dear to George Orwell. Admittedly, there is still a morality of work
shared in popular circles where, failing to enrich oneself by working
more, number, one hopes at least to attain a degree of security,
relative ease and, at the very least, a vague sense of personal dignity.
In this respect Sarkozy’s “Working more to earn more” could find an
echo among these people. They are now saying that none of this is
guaranteed – not even a well-deserved retirement after a busy life. The Macronie is the thought of managers applied to the whole society without political mediation. Capitalism in its essential brutality.
10. “Yellow vests: can the middle class be revolutionary? LundiMatin, December 7, 2018.
11. We saw in the case of Notre-Dame-des-landes the use that was made of this little institutional thing that is the referendum – and Macron was a minister in the government that tried to use this arrogant coup … We can see now its confusing use in the hands of demagogues like Etienne Chouard.
taken from here
Der Beitrag Full Metal Yellow Jacket erschien zuerst auf non.copyriot.com.